The first Boeing 747 rolls off the production line with Pan Am markings and dwarfs a Pan Am Boeing 707-321B sitting in the foreground, Everett, Washington, March 5, 1969.

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747s weren't just for passengers. An early cargo model, operated by Lufthansa.

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Attendees gather to view a Boeing 747-8 Intercontinental, the company's newest and largest passenger plane, during an unveiling ceremony February 13, 2011 at the company's factory in Everett, Washington. The new plane features quieter, more fuel-efficient engines, more seating, and a redesigned interior. The first plane also featured a red paint job, a departure from the traditional Boeing blue.

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These days, most new 747-8s are the freighter variant, seen here making its first test flight February 8, 2009 at Paine Field in Everett, Washington.

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From the biggest 747 to the smallest, the 747-SP.

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One of the better-known jumbos. Fresh from the STS-126 mission space shuttle Endeavour, mounted atop its modified Boeing 747 carrier aircraft, flew over California's Mojave Desert on its way back to the Kennedy Space Center in Florida on December 10, 2008.

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A Boeing VC-25 on the tarmac in Belfast, Northern Ireland. You may know this plane as Air Force One, although that's only its callsign if the US president is onboard.

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The VC-25 has a scarier sibling, the E-4B Advanced Airborne Command Post.

The flight deck of a Boeing 747-8 Intercontinental airliner that was delivered to Lufthansa in 2012. The glass cockpit is a far cry from the ones early 747 crews would be used to.

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United Continental's new 747 takes off from San Francisco's International Airport in San Francisco, California, on Wednesday, February 23, 2011.

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Four years later, United retired its last 747.

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A commercial plane, a Boeing 747 flying in front of the moon on September 30, 2010 is seen from Martigues, close to Marseille, southern France, September 30, 2010. What a great photo!

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Regular 747 not big enough for you? How about this large cargo freighter variant used by Boeing to move around 787 Dreamliner parts.

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On Wednesday, Delta Airlines flight 9771 flew from Atlanta to Pinal Airpark in Arizona. It wasn't a full flight—just 48 people on board. But it was a milestone—and not just for the two people who got married mid-flight—for it marked the very last flight of a Boeing 747 being operated by a US airline. Delta's last scheduled passenger service with the jumbo was actually late in December, at which point it conducted a farewell tour and then some charter flights. But as of today, after 51 long years in service, if you want to ride a 747 you'll need to be traveling abroad.

Way back in the 1960s, when the white heat of technological progress was burning bright, it looked for a while as if supersonic air travel was going to be the next big thing. France and Britain were collaborating on a new kind of airliner that would fly at twice the speed of sound and shrink the globe. But there was just one thing they hadn't counted on: Boeing and its gargantuan 747 jumbo jet. The double-decker airliner wouldn't break the sound barrier, but its vast size compared to anything else in the skies helped drop the cost of long-haul air travel, opening it up to the people in a way Concorde could never hope to do.

Boeing was already having a pretty good time selling its 707 jetliner, but Pan American Airlines boss Juan Trippe wanted something special for his passengers, and he approached the aircraft manufacturer with a request for a plane that could carry twice as many passengers as its bread-and-butter long-haul model. In 1966, Trippe signed an order for 25 of the new passenger airliners. The first of these entered service in 1970, and the world would never be the same again.

Since then, more than 1,500 747s have left Boeing's factory in Everett, Washington. Most spent their lives carrying passengers for airlines or carrying freight around the world. But some special variants have lived more exciting lives, fighting forest fires, carrying presidents—even ferrying space shuttles. The US Air Force uses a small fleet of E-4Bs as airborne doomsday control centers, and it even tried using one for ballistic missile defense, complete with a giant laser poking out its nose. More outrageous (stillborn) proposals even wanted to use 747s as mobile cruise missile launchers or as airborne aircraft carriers for little jet fighters.

Now that every US carrier has retired its 747s, if you want to fly one, your best bet is with British Airways, which still operates 36 of them, many on routes to the US. Here are 11, seen at Heathrow's Terminal 5 in 2013.

I think our former colleague Andrew Cunningham would appreciate this All Nippon Airways "Pokemon Jet US version" 747-400. ANA has painted more than one 747 up in Pokemon colors.

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Andrew would probably also dig this one, an Air New Zealand 747 painted up for Lord of the Rings.

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All good things come to an end. Scraps of metal sit about as Air Salvage International dismantles a Boeing 747 aircraft on April 12, 2010 at Kemble airfield, Cotswolds, England. The dormant airplanes are collected in one of the largest graveyards for aircrafts. The Boeings are reduced to a pile of sheet metal by an excavator on wheels and then moved to a recycling plant.

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Come on in, the water's fine!

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Oops—anyone have any superglue? A damaged Kalitta Air cargo plane lies by the runway at Zaventem, Brussels International Airport, on May 25, 2008 in Zaventem, Belgium. Four people were slightly injured when the Boeing 747 slid off the runway at take off and split in half.

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Part of the wreckage of the two Boeing 747s, KLM 4805 and Pan Am 1736, which collided on the runway of Los Rodeos Airport, killing 583 people, the deadliest collision in aviation history.

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Some of the wreckage of Pan Am Flight 103 after it crashed onto the town of Lockerbie in Scotland, 22nd December 1988. On 21st December 1988, the Boeing 747 Clipper Maid of the Seas was destroyed en route from Heathrow to JFK airport in New York, when a bomb was detonated in its forward cargo hold. All 259 people on board were killed, as well as 11 people in the town of Lockerbie.

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The 747's long career has seen it fly billions of miles, carrying billions of passengers, but it also had its share of tragedies. In 1977, a pair of 747s (one KLM, one Pan Am) crashed into each other on the runway at Tenerife's airport. In 1983, the USSR shot down a Korean Air Lines 747 after mistaking it for a US spy plane. Terrorist bombs destroyed two 747s mid-flight—an Air India 747 in 1985 and a Pan Am 747 in 1988—and several more had been hijacked in the 1970s. Other disasters resulted from poor maintenance or human error. Terrible as those incidents were, they should be seen in context: 61 747s (out of 1,540) have been lost since 1970, more than half of which came without any loss of life—jumbos are estimated to have carried more than 3.5 billion passengers since 1970.

On a personal note, the 747 has been a pretty important aircraft in my life. When my family moved from South Africa to the UK in the late 1970s, it was onboard a jumbo jet. And I'm pretty sure the same is true for my move to the US back in 2002. This past summer I crossed the Atlantic in 747s twice, most memorably sitting in seat 1A on one occasion.

If this post has you hankering to spend some time airborne in a jumbo, fret not; although no US passenger carriers still operate the big bird, several hundred remain in service with other airlines, most notably British Airways and Lufthansa. And if you happen to be an oligarch or Saudi prince, Boeing will happily build you your own 747-8—but don't expect it to be cheap!

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Promoted Comments

Smaller aircraft for the most part. Airlines have moved away from the hub and spoke architecture which is why planes like the 747 and A380 have been falling out of favor. People prefer direct flights in a 737 or A380 over having a layover but flying in something larger.

Also, the extended twinjets like the 777-9 are going to fit nearly as many people and have lower operating costs than the quadjets like the 747. ETOPS is definitely a factor in the decline of the 747.

ETOPS absolutely. Once twin engine jets achieved the ETOPS certifications necessary to do pond-crossing the 4-engine jets like the A380 and 747 were doomed, and they were additionally doomed by the fuel price increases of the 2000's and new aircraft designs that were aggressively focused on wide body, low drag, high fuel efficiency planes and engines.

As to the reason why the price of air travel declined so dramatically in the 60's, it was largely due to the invention of the high-bypass turbofans Boeing built for the C-5 Galaxy. The TF39 was developed into the CF6 family of turbofans that powered the first 747's. The 747 was was sort of the confluence of a bunch of different technologies that helped make low cost, long-distance air travel a reality.